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then in high repute. A brother of Mrs. Keats had been an officer in Duncan's ship in the action off Camperdown, and had distinguished himself there both by his signal bravery, and by his peculiarly lofty stature, which made him a special mark for the enemy's shot. This sailor uncle was the ideal of the boys, and filled their imagination with a notion of keeping up the family's reputation for courage, which was manifested in George by a passive manliness, but in John and Thomas by intense pugnacity. This disposition, however, in all of them seems to have been combined with much tenderness, and in John with a sensibility which exhibited itself in the strongest contrasts. He was easily convulsed with laughter or tears, and would pass rapidly from one emotion to another. His skill in all manly exercises, and his perfect generosity of character, rendered him extremely popular, and impressed his schoolfellows with a conviction of his future superiority, as one of them has recorded, "rather in a military or some such active sphere of life, than in the peaceful arena of literature." This impression was assisted by the vivacity of his countenance and beauty of feature. His eyes were large and sensitive, flashing with strong emotion, or suffused with tender sympathies; his hair hung in thick brown ringlets, round a head diminutive for the breadth of the shoulders below; while the small. ness of the lower limbs, which in later life marred the proportion of his person, was not then apparent, any more than the undue prominence of the lower lip, which gave his face too pugnacious a character to be entirely pleasing. His indifference to being thought well of, as a good boy, was as

'Mr. E. Holmes, author of the Life of Mozart.

remarkable as his facility in getting through his daily tasks, which did not seem to occupy much of his attention, until a sudden intellectual ambition developed itself, and he succeeded in carrying off the school prizes at a large sacrifice of his exercises and amusements.

The actual amount of his classical attainments at this time of his life, and indeed later, seems very uncertain. The school could have had no special pretensions to scholarship, for he was never taught Greek. He must have read Virgil diligently, if not familiarly, for before he left Enfield, he had translated on paper the whole of the Æneid, but it was the ordinary school-manuals such as "Tooke's Pantheon," "Spence's Polymetis," and "Lemprière's Dictionary," that introduced his fancy to the enchanted world of old mythology. It is an interesting speculation, whether deeper and more regular studies would have checked or encouraged the natural consanguinity, so to say, of his fancy with the ideal life of the ancient world, and whether a more distinct knowledge of what the old mythology really meant, would or would not have hindered that reconstruction of forms

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which is now not the less agreeable from being the evolution of his unlearned and unaided imagination. He may, indeed, have afterwards extended his knowledge beyond these scanty limits, for among his books was left a fine copy of the "Auctores Mythographici Latini, Lugd. Bat. 1742, 4to," with his name on the title page, and apparently read or consulted; and Sir Charles Dilke possesses a Delphin folio, of Ovid's Metamorphoses, with the

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autograph of John Keats, 1812. Nor did his inclinations seem any way peculiar, within the ordinary range of schoolboy reading. The immortal "Robinson Crusoe' and Marmontel's "Incas of Peru," were among his favourite books, and he must have known something of Shakespeare, for he told a schoolfellow considerably younger than himself, he thought no one could dare to read "Macbeth" alone in the house at two o'clock in the morning.

On the death of their remaining parent, the young Keatses came under the guardianship of Mr. Abbey, a merchant; and a sum under eight thousand pounds was left to be divided among the four children, of which the daughter received the larger share. It does not appear whether John's wishes were consulted in his apprenticeship to Mr. Hammond, a surgeon of some eminence at Edmonton, at the age of fifteen.

The vicinity to Enfield enabled him to keep up his connection with the family of his preceptor, and especially with the son, in whom he had found a friend capable of sympathizing with his finest sentiments and highest tastes, and in this genial atmosphere his powers gradually expanded. He was always borrowing books, but so little expec. tation was formed of the direction his ability would take, that when he asked for the loan of Spenser's Fairy Queen," in the beginning of 1812, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke remembers that the family were amused by what they thought a boyish ambition to study so illustrious a monu, ment of literature. But the effect on him of that great work of ideality was electrical. He walked over to Enfield at least once a week, to talk Spenser with his friend. "He ramped through the scenes of the romance," writes Mr. Clarke,

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"like a young horse turned into a spring mea dow;" he revelled in the gorgeousness of the ima gery, as in the pleasures of a sense fresh found. the force and felicity of an epithet (such for example as "the sea-shouldering whale") would light up his countenance with ecstasy, and some fine touch of description would seem to strike on the secret chords of his soul and generate countless harmonies. Not only are the "Lines in imitation of Spenser," with the exception of some indifferent sonnets, the earliest known verses of his composition, but the stream of his inspiration remained long coloured by the rich soil over which it then flowed. Nor will the just critic of the maturer poems of Keats fail to trace to the influence of the study of Spenser much that at first appears forced and fantastical both in idea and in expression, and suspect that some of the very defects, which are commonly attributed to an extravagant originality, may be distinguished as proceeding from a too indiscriminate reverence for a great, but unequal, model.

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It is not recorded what was the cause of the breach of John Keats's indenture with Mr. Hammond, but we find him, some time before its termination, residing with his two brothers, at that time clerks in Mr. Abbey's office, in the Poultry, over the passage that led to the "Queen's Arms Tavern," and walking the hospitals in the exercise of his profession. attended the usual lectures, and a book of careful annotations, now in the possession of Sir Charles Dilke, attests his diligence, though a fellowstudent, Mr. Henry Stephens, who lodged in the same house, has described him as fond of scribbling doggerel rhyme among the notes, especially if he got hold of another student's

syllabus. He would sometimes show graver verses to his companions, by whom they were hardly likely to be appreciated, and there was much surprise when he passed the examination at Apothecaries' Hall with considerable credit. But during this period of life he was in the enjoyment of an advantage which, in the circumstances of his family, must be regarded as a singular good fortune-an intercourse of the most familiar and friendly nature with a body of remarkable men, of especial literary culture, sympathetic notions, and an order of thought congenial to his own intellectual disposition. Had the early youth of Keats fallen, as well it might have done, among mere common-place associates, it is probable that the rare development, which gave to the four years of his literary life the consistence of a poetical existence, would have been spent in unavailing struggles, and might have ended, as did that of Chatterton, in profitless despair. The brothers Hunt were the centre of the social circle to which, through the friendship and companionship of Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, he obtained admittance: they were the Editors of the 66 Examiner" newspaper, and had lately attracted notoriety and sympathy by. their imprisonment for a libel on the Regent, in which some sharp personal satire was interpreted into dangerous political significance. It was thus an unfortunate concurrence that Keats became unwittingly identified, not only with a literary coterie, with whose specialities he had little in common, but with a supposed political association for revolutionary objects with which he enter tained nothing beyond the vaguest sympathy. There is nothing in his letters or in his recorded conversation to show that he took even an

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